Teaching PR

So this week my PR Communication students are learning about PR uses of the Internet. I lectured for two hours on Monday, with fully an hour on blogging. My PowerPoint lecture was peppered with hyperlinks, and I even showed them my Google Reader page with headlines from lots of PR blogs (the two I happened to pull up were PR Squared and Micro Persuasion, if anyone cares). And yesterday they did a lab assignment where they had to enter a keyword of their choice into Blogdigger, read the first five posts that came up, and write a report about how blogs may or may not help with public relations research.

I was frankly disappointed after the lecture. The students were not very engaged and didn't even seem to think it was especially enlightening. The lab, on the other hand, opened some eyes. Their keywords, ranging from Howard University to Harry Potter, were things that they were personally interested in, so they liked seeing what other people had written. They found some posts interesting, some helpful, some oddities and, yes, even some porn (that would be keyword "ninja"). They seemed to enjoy the assignment, and I actually enjoyed grading their papers... but that's a subject for another day!